Typically, Yahoo boy Scammers message hundreds of people online while presenting as members of the opposite sex using images stolen from social media. They arrange all kinds of frauds, but for those who involve blackmail, they often try to build a relationship with their potential victim and get compromise information – most often, bare images. Then they change toothpasts.
“At some point, they reveal their identity after they get everything they need, and then they start to blackmail,” Maimon says. They require money and threaten to release pictures online or send them to family and friends if they do not pay. “One of the approaches they use to make sure that blackmail is realistic, actually produces those news they send to the victims and somehow push them, bare them to pay the blackmail,” he says. “They try to push you to make decisions under stress conditions, in urgency.”
Yahoo Boy frauds are widely used by social media platform Telegram as a way to organize, chat with each other, and as a marketplace, where they sell knowledge and tutorials on how to work various types of frauds. The video about “news” viewed by Wired seem to include the details and images of real-world victims, although it was not possible to immediately control the cases.
Brian Mason, a boss with the Edmonton Police Service in Canada, who explores fraud and works with the victims of fraud, says he saw cases where videos or screenshots of fake CNN broadcasts were sent to victims. “It looks like your typical CNN broadcast,” Mason says. “It’s very, very convincing.” Mason says the approach was used in SexTortation Scamswho usually target teens and were linked to a series of suicides.
Mason says he saw incidents, where the news clips falsely accuse scam victims of speaking with underage females and that police are looking for them or issued wars for their arrest. “It causes the victim to panic because now they see themselves in this broadcast, and it’s a screen -capture since they actually talked to the scammer of their own webcam,” Mason adds. The effect may possibly push the person into sending money or follow demands from the scammers.
Telegram did not immediately respond to Wired’s request for a comment on the blackmail scams contained in Yahoo Boy channels. Last year, Telegram removed more than a dozen yahoo -boy channels after Wired reported on their public activity; However the scammers still have a presence on the platform and other social media platformsincluding Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube.
Messages divided within telegram channels show how fraudsters rapidly evolve their opposites, use new technologies and widely share or sell advice with each other. For example, when people relocated to Chinese alternative rednote Prior to Ban Tiktok’s proposed ban in the United States earlier this month, Yahoo Boys recommended targeting people who joined the app.